


Near-death Clichés

by Clubsheartsspades



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Canonical Child Abuse, Child Neglect, Childhood Friends, Happy Ending, Jon grew up in a bookstore, Multi, Non-Binary Jonathan Sims, ambiguous existence of ghosts, mostly by Mary Keay and Martin's mom, no powers/no fears, rated m because language and non-explicit sex, the inherent longing of being in love with your childhood friend, this is a rom-com, this starts in school then goes on to university and at the end they're adults
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-31
Updated: 2020-08-22
Packaged: 2021-03-06 20:47:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,282
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26045236
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Clubsheartsspades/pseuds/Clubsheartsspades
Summary: In the nearly fifteen years he's known Jon, Gerry discovered two things:1) Falling in love with him is incredibly easy.2) Keeping him safe is impossible.Martin, on the other hand, still has to learn both of those things.
Relationships: Georgie Barker/Melanie King, Gerard Keay/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Martin Blackwood/Gerard Keay, Martin Blackwood/Gerard Keay/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Sasha James/Tim Stoker
Comments: 5
Kudos: 46





	Near-death Clichés

**Author's Note:**

> Hi! No idea why I thought of this, but i had this idea haunting my thoughts for a while now!
> 
> So we'll have some chapters watching them grow up together, just a few points in their lives, when they're children, pre-teens, teenagers, then as adults we stop the time jumps, then we have some professional falling in love.

The drive from London to Bournemouth takes roughly two hours. At least that’s what Dad said, and Gerry is pretty sure he has been in this car for far longer than two hours. Far longer. Six hours. At least. And maybe, just maybe, it was a mistake to just take one of the boring books from his Mom’s book pile. Because this book has no good scenes in it, there’s no actual plot (Gerry is pretty sure plot is important for a book to be good), but there are a lot of very long texts in very tiny writing with colourful illustrations next to it. Gerry only picked it because his Mom saw him browsing through her discarded books and suddenly found him the most interesting thing in her shop. That _never_ happens. Mom is only interested in her own books and sometimes his grades. So when he held up this book and asked her if he could take it with him to read on the ride, her eyes suddenly gleamed and she nodded with this kind of grin in her face that told him he finally did something right!

The book, as it turns out, is very bland. And even though he doesn’t like it, he still tries to figure out what it is about. Mom will ask about it when they get home, she will smile at him and ask what he thought and if he liked it, so he really has to get through a couple of chapters at least.

It’s a little like a school book. And if Gerry just pretends, he’s reading it for school, that makes it a bit easier. He likes school, he can tell Tim all about it on Monday morning. And maybe even Danny, who’s Tim’s younger brother and for some reason always tags along.

“Everything alright back there?”, Dad asks. He’s driving, of course, so he can’t really turn around, but his eyes flicker up for a moment, to the small mirror in the front.

“Did you know”, Gerry says, pointing to a passage in his book Dad can’t see, “that Renaissance happened in Italy?”

Dad laughs, but it’s a good laugh, not the way Mom giggles when talking to the patrons she doesn’t like.

“I did not.”

Gerry nods. Well, now he knows. Maybe it’s not that bad to have the book instead of his toys, it’s not like he needs them, really, he’s _eight_. He can read, and Mom often lets him do stuff that’s super important. Like help her with the new deliveries or give suggestion on her filing system (which is less Gerry giving suggestions and more Mom telling him how to do things right).

But still…

“Are we there yet?”

“Just a couple more minutes, Gerry.”

Gerry kicks his legs. “How long are a couple more minutes?”

Dad hums as he takes a turn. “Not long. I bet you won’t finish your book before we get there.”

Of course he won’t. His book is not really thick, but the writing is really, really small, so there’s a lot to read on not many pages. He kicks his feet against the seat in front of him. Usually Mom sits there, but because she stayed home, she’s not here right now, so she can’t complain about it. Gerry really doesn’t like it when Mom is mad at him for small things like kicking his feet. It’s not fair, she shouldn’t scream at him. This is just so boring, that’s not his fault, is it?

“Do you want to play a game?”, Dad asks and takes a turn.

“What game?” Gerry furrows his brows, but he stops kicking. His book lies open over his lap, but he doesn’t remember where he stopped reading exactly. Mom says that sometimes, too, and Gerry never likes the games she wants to play. It usually ends with him in the basement, looking for books she claims she hid there for him to find, but the only thing he finds are spiders and dust. But this is a car, and there’s really no basement here.

“It’s really easy, I give you a word and you have to find a word that starts with the last letter of that word, then I have to find a word that starts with the last letter of your word, and so on. Does that sound like fun?”

Gerry grins widely. “I know so many words.”

“Alright, let’s start then. First word is: car.”

“R… rrred.”

“Yes, like that. Door.”

“R-right.”

“Teacher.”

“R again, why are you giving me so many r words?” Gerry pulls at his seatbelt a little, just to wiggle and make his point clear.

Dad chuckles, his eyes fly to the mirror again. “Sorry, Gerry, I didn’t mean to. Let’s go with… hm… telephone instead. There you have an…?”

“E. Like uhm elephant.”

“Oof, another t then, this is the r’s all over again.”

Gerry bounces as good as he can in his car seat and his seatbelt. “It’s not!”

“Alright, alright, then, let’s see…”

The game, as it turns out, has no winner, but that doesn’t matter much, because everything is more interesting than his book at this point. And the streets they’re driving through aren’t as exciting as Dad wants them to be. Gerry doesn’t really see the appeal in small towns. The ocean is pretty, but there’s nothing wrong with London, is it? If you drive two hours through London, you’re just on the other side! And maybe that’s why this drive takes ages? Because it’s two hours just London, then six hours just to Bournemouth, then another two hours to find the bookstore they’re heading to. That’s too long to sit in a car! Even with this game they’re playing. Especially when they circled through so many words Gerry has a problem coming up with new ones and remembering which ones they already used, it just loses its appeal.

“Roof”, Dad says. He always has more words. He’s like a dictionary.

“Fuck!” Gerry says with the same ferocity Mom does, when she says it. Dad sputters, the car stutters from whatever he did to the controls when Gerry screamed, but it doesn’t stop.

“Gerry! Who taught you that?”

Gerry just grins. He has a tooth gap with one of his back teeth missing, so you can’t see it, but he can whistle through it if he tries. He does now.

Dad sighs, his brows are furrowed in that particular way they often are when Mom gives him a shopping list for new books. “That’s not a good word, Gerry, you shouldn’t use it.”

“But Mom uses it all the time!”

“Yes, and Mom shouldn’t use it either.”

Gerry kicks the seat. “It starts with f.”

“Yes, but it doesn’t count. Promise me you’re not using it again?”

“Then why is everyone else allowed to use it?”

“Nobody is allowed to use it, but a lot of adults are irresponsible and do it anyway. Have you ever heard _me_ say it?”

Dad looks at him again. Gerry wants to say Yes, but he cannot remember Dad swearing ever. Mom does, all the time, her customers do sometimes, too.

“No?”

“See? You can live without it.”

Gerry huffs. “That game is stupid.”

Dad laughs. “Is it now?”

Instead of an answer, Gerry holds up his book and hides his face behind the white-brownish cover. He rolls his eyes without his Dad seeing, just to make sure. Then he stares out of the window like the children in movies usually do. The idle music playing in the background isn’t something Gerry likes to listen to, but he’s not complaining. At all.

Outside, he finds they actually entered a city by now. It’s all houses and shops and some restaurants passing by with people sitting and walking around. Children play on the streets and if Gerry turns to the other side, he can actually see the beach. His book falls back onto his lap again. It’s already warm enough to go for a swim or to have some ice cream on your walk.

Then, the car turns, and they leave the beach and the ice cream and the people there behind. This street is, while still full of people, not as full as the one before. The people here walk slower, stand in front of windows – some still have ice cream.

“See?”, Dad says, “We’re here.”

They’re not quite “here” yet. Dad has to look for a good spot for the car, but at least he gets to get out of the car soon. And isn’t that a relief?

As soon as the car stands, and Dad moves to get out, Gerry scrambles for the seatbelt and gets out of the seat before Dad has any chance to try and help him out. He’s eight. And he’s almost too big for the children car seat, so this is no problem whatsoever.

Dad still insists on him holding his hand.

“It’s right this way, Gerry. You’ll like it there, it’s a lot like home.”

Gerry raises both eyebrows. Nothing is actually like home. Because home can be very good and very dangerous at different times. Dad should know what it’s like to live with Mom. She always complains he has been around for even longer than Gerry has.

The next street they take is too narrow for two cars to drive through at the same time. Far less people walk here, the few that do, stick around the shop windows and different offers outside. The houses grow high to both their sides, the fronts of shops are either dark or very brightly coloured, and the street is cobbled which makes skipping a little harder. Only a few smaller alleys lead between the houses, other than that everything here is very straight through.

“Here it is!”

So now, they’re “here”. And it turns out “here” is a bookshop. An old shop, far older than Mom’s. This one has a darker coloured front, the wood here wasn’t painted over and the books in the window either look really, really old or shiny and brand new. The sign over the door and the window says “Sims and Evans Books”. It is, very clearly, a bookshop.

Inside, it smells like books. Gerry is intimately familiar with the way books and wooden shelfs for said books smell. However, this shop has more in stock than new hardback copies of bestsellers. It has three storeys, as far as Gerry can tell. The first one, the ground floor, is the one he and Dad enter first. It’s very open here, in a way that home isn’t. The bookshelves are pushed against the walls, and the tables in the middle of the shop aren’t high enough to obscure the view through the entire room. The books are all new here. There’s actually more to see than just books. Some games lie on the tables, there is a corner with a small table and small chairs for children to draw on. it stands on a colourful play rug, where a handful of Legos wait to be used in the frankly impressively high construct right next to one of the chairs. This isn’t like home. This is safe. The room looks big, clean and organised, impossible to get lost in. Stairs lead upwards and a sign in the form of an arrow points to said stairs, reading “travel, esoteric, religion, cooking” for the books on the first floor. Another arrow points downwards to the “Antiques” as the sign announces.

Inside, Dad doesn’t let go of his hand. Even as they walk up to the counter, behind which an elderly looking woman in a dark hijab sorts through a list of surely very important things.

“Can I help you?”, she asks quickly.

“Ah yes, I’m Eric Delano? From Pinhole books, we talked on the phone.”

“Yes, about the”, she checks her papers for a moment, frowns, then checks again. “Yes, three books. They Key of Solomon, A Journal of The Plague Year, and The Stalwart Hunter’s Almanac.”

“Uhm, yes that’s right, except my wife wants to check with you if your copy of Ex Altiora is still available.”

“It’s not, unfortunately.”

Gerry tugs at Dad’s hand. This is all fascinating adult stuff, which usually means a lot of talking and no doing. But there are so many things around here! He hasn’t even seen what books they have! And he wants to go upstairs to see what the room there looks like. And what else is downstairs, if there are antiques there. Maybe there’s a ghost vanity, or a closet that brings you back in time? Everybody knows antiques have different superpowers and if they don’t that’s just really, really unfortunate for the owner.

“Can we- just a second”, Dad says before he leans down to be eye to eye with Gerry. “Are you bored?”

Gerry hangs on to his hand. “This is all important.”

“Mr. Delano”, the woman says from behind the register, “it’s perfectly okay for your son to explore a little. We also have a small area for children to play in?”

She clearly points to the colourful table and chairs, but from his perspective Gerry can’t see her.

“How does that sound, Gerry?”

Far better than listening to two adults talk about boring things. But those boring things are also super important to Mom.

“I don’t know…”

“Tell you what”, Dad holds out his other hand for him to hold onto it, too, “you can stay and listen if you want to, but if you get really, really bored, you can go explore. But you have to stay inside the shop. Deal?”

Gerry nods and takes both his hands. “Yes!”

“Perfect.” With one last pat on his shoulder, Dad straightens up again and the woman and him discuss something else Mom probably wants.

The first minute, Gerry tries his hardest to follow what they’re talking about, but it’s so hard to concentrate on these things. He only understands half of it, and there are really a lot of interesting things around to look at. So Gerry starts to poke around the counter first. There are a couple of pocket-sized books there, paper backs in garish colours Gerry doesn’t want to peek inside. Next to the counter, there are postcards of Bournemouth, the ocean, some tourist spots apparently. And that’s about it. What else is there?

In the middle of the shop wait low tables with big books and small writing inside. The shelves are more colourful, with dragons and birds and swords on the covers and a lot bigger writing, and sometimes even pictures, inside. Gerry reads the summary of a few, but he’s not done exploring, and he really doesn’t want to read another book on the drive. Maybe they have toys here? But if he comes back with a toy, Mom will be disappointed. Or worse even, she might be mad at him. She might not let him take her books with him anymore.

The few shelves and tables with games and toys and plush toys even, go ignored in favour of the next bookshelf that holds picture books. But those are for babies.

Next to the children books stands the table and the chairs. A box with colourful Legos stands under the table. It’s mostly empty, as many of the pieces went into the construction of the truly massive tower there. Gerry nods approvingly. Yes, this is modern architecture, a truly sophisticated creation of hard-plastic and spite.

Gerry bends down to pick up a few of the leftover pieces, when he notices a third adult with Dad. It’s another woman, but she’s far younger and carries a bunch of big, old looking books with her. And there is also, apparently because the second woman brought them with her, another child. They noticed Gerry first and are already making their way over to him. Quickly, Gerry drops the Legos. This isn’t actually his place to play with things, he’s not at home here. But it’s polite to greet, so he nods like his parents nod to people and says: “Hi.”

The child doesn’t say anything, they just reach out for the Legos he dropped and hands them back to Gerry.

“Take them”, they say, then they kneel down next to the tower and grab the next piece in reach to stick it on the top. “They go here.”

“Okay”, Gerry says and sticks the next Lego to the ever-growing tower.

The other one nods. “Very good.”

“I’m Gerry”, Gerry says as the child sticks another piece on top.

“Jon”, Jon says and hands Gerry another piece. He then points to where it goes. “There.”

The tower is already very wobbly, but Gerry sticks it on anyway. “It’ll fall.”

Jon frowns, willing the tower to stop and gain more stability from his stare alone. He says something in a language Gerry is pretty sure is not English, then he reaches out to the tower. He looks at Gerry.

“What?”

He repeats the gibberish Gerry assumes is a question. When Gerry doesn’t answer he frowns in the same way Tim frowns when he wants the adults to call him cute and take pity on him, so that they bring him another juice or make him another sandwich and he doesn’t have to do anything. For various reasons, Gerry is pretty sure Jon isn’t aware of it.

He makes a pushing motion with his hands. “Push it?”

“Break it?”

“Yes!” Jon nods and repeats the pushing motion. “Yes! Break it!” Then he raises his hands over his head. “We build it bigger!”

Gerry pushes the tower, but it’s built from Legos, so it pretty much just rolls over and doesn’t break.

“Oh-oh”, Jon says. He grabs the top part, then holds it out for Gerry to grab the bottom half and they pull it apart easily. Gerry grins widely, Jon just giggles when he starts picking the pieces apart and throw them back into the box.

He’s far smaller than Gerry. And younger. Gerry doesn’t really play with very little children, except maybe with Danny when Tim brings him along, but maybe it’s okay today. He has quite literally no other choice.

Jon pulls the Lego box closer to them, just to then pull himself up and reach for something else on the table. He hands Gerry a Barbie doll in a long, yellow dress, and drops another one onto the floor to where he sits.

“No”, Gerry says before Jon kneels back down. He holds a sheet of paper with a lot of scribbles, and numbers and letters on it that don’t make much sense as far as he can see.

Jon looks up from his paper, questioning.

“This is for girls.” He hands him the doll back.

“No”, Jon says, but he takes the Barbie. “They are mine.” Then he turns the paper and Gerry can read “Hi, I’m Di Dil La D Jon. I’m 5 years old. 1 +1 = 2 ABCDE GH K” written by someone who is clearly not used to writing, which doesn’t tell him much, except maybe that Jon is currently learning how to write.

“I don’t want to play with dolls.” Gerry shakes his head.

Jon shakes his head, too, then says something else Gerry can’t understand and reaches for a handful of only partly disassembled pieces. He hands them to Gerry, who proceeds to build a new base for a bigger, but more stable tower.

“Gerry”, Jon says with a disgruntled face. “No. This is too long. Too long.”

He holds up the paper and pencil, where he copied the sentences from before and replaced “Jon” with “Jer”. “You write it.”

“It’s Gerry”, he says his name slowly while writing. “Gerry. And I’m eight.”

Jon stares at him with big, round eyes. “Eight?” He makes an approving noise. “So you go to school!”

“Yes.” Gerry hands him the paper back.

“Yes, thank you! Can you read?”

“I read a book on my way here!” Gerry says proudly.

“Oh”, Jon points to the books in his back, the children’s book assortment. “My mommy teaches me”, he pulls a face. “But reading is not easy.”

“My mom taught me, too.” Gerry stacks more blocks onto the first layer of what might become a pyramid, he’s not sure yet. Back when he wasn’t in school yet, Mom insisted on him having an advantage to other children, so he absolutely had to learn how to write and read before he even started school. It wasn’t bad, but Mom has her own ideas of how to handle problems, like getting him to be more interested in the books she put in front of him. He can read now. He knows what’s going on. That’s enough.

On his knees, Jon reaches over to stack a couple of the Legos on top of Gerry’s construction.

“No, they go there!” Gerry points, but Jon frowns. He straightens up, stretches all the way until he stands on his tiptoes and holds his hands over his head.

“We have to build it this tall.” He says, very confidently. Gerry frowns. He stands up, measuring Jon’s entire height. Even stretched out like this, from his tiptoes to his fingertips, Jon isn’t as tall as Gerry is.

“You are pretty small.” He measures Jon by putting his flat palm on his head, but it doesn’t tell him anything except that Jon only just reaches his chest. All while Jon puts his hand over Gerry’s while still on his head.

“Also, you have very long hair.” Very long might be a bit of an exaggeration. It just so reaches his shoulders. With both their hands on his head, Jon nods.

“I do!”

“I bet I could pick you up!”

Jon grins widely. “Yes!”

Gerry has never picked anybody up that wasn’t a puppet or doll, or a plush toy. He’s not quite sure how he should grab Jon, but he’s seen adults pick children up all the time. And they always do it under the arms, unless they’re picking up really, really small babies. Gerry can’t really pick Jon up like a small baby even if he’s still very small, but he figures he can try it under his arms. And as he grabs him, Jon holds onto him, too.

“Ready?” Gerry takes a breath, bracing himself for the weight of a body in his arms.

“Yes!”, Jon says again.

In one breath, Gerry picks him up. And he miscalculated roughly every single thing there was to miscalculate. Jon is far lighter than he thought, he needs far less strength to lift him than he uses, he doesn’t need to lean back as far as he does. So the moment he lifts him, Gerry stumbles backwards, trips over his own Lego creation, and lands on his ass and elbows with Jon half on top and half next to him.

“Ow”, Jon says, rubbing his hand over his forehead.

“Fuck!”, Gerry says.

Jon giggles then. “Yes”, he says, “Fuck!”

“No, Dad says not to say that!”

Jon tries to get up again but hits his head on the small table and lets himself fall back down. He makes a whining noise and Gerry worries he’ll start crying and the adults will blame him because he’s a big child and he should look out for the little children, but Jon doesn’t cry. He just sits back down and keeps his head low. He’s really not a baby, not like the little children in school. They never want to play with Gerry or Tim, and they always cry when they fall. Except for Danny, maybe. But Danny is Tim’s brother, that’s different.

“You want uhm”, Jon pushes some of the colourful pieces towards Gerry. “You want to build the house? I…” He pouts, then shakes his head.

“You want the”, what follows are a couple of sounds that sound English, but they make no sense to Gerry whatsoever. But this feels like it’s going well so far.

“What?”

“The uhm… blocks.” Jon holds three blocks up that have been stuck together. They’re green and red. “You want the blocks?”

“Ah, yes.”

Jon nods. He stacks one more red block on top, just so that it’s two green and two red blocks, then hands them over to Gerry.

“You’re welcome.” He then picks up one of his dolls. “You don’t want mine?”

“No.” Gerry is looking through the Lego box to find another one of the long pieces, just to finish the first side.

“Hm”, Jon says and sounds a lot like a bad imitation of Dad when he tries to guess something he can’t possibly know.

“You can sort the pieces, I need a lot of the big ones.”

“How big?” Jon is already rummaging through the Lego box.

“The slim, long ones.” Gerry holds up said piece. “Not those ones. They are two.”

Jon lets the pieces he picked up fall back into the box. “My mommy bought this box. And my grandma bought my dolls. But! I – I play upstairs. Because mom is not here often. And I’m not allowed here alone.”

“You’re not alone here, now.” Gerry takes the pieces Jon hands him and expands the tower upwards.

“Yes. I’m not allow- my gran doesn’t like my friends inside. Inside the bookshop.”

“Why not?”

Jon looks at him confused. “Because it is a bookshop.”

That actually makes a lot of sense. Mom would kill him if he asked for Tim and Danny to come over to the shop to play. Children don’t belong into bookshops, unless they live there. Like Gerry does. And Jon apparently, too.

“Here”, he hands him more Legos, all sorted by colour. “Are you here to buy books?”

“Yes.” Gerry sticks more blocks onto the slowly growing top. “Mom wanted antique books, so Dad and I came to pick them up. We always buy different books for Mom’s shop.”

“Is it a bookshop, too?” Jon sits back from his knees, but he’s sitting too close to the table behind him and, when he lets himself fall back, he hits one of the legs with his back. The motion moves the table backwards and a tall glass filled with different coloured pencils starts to wobble. Jon makes a noise, but before he can move away, the pencil glass loses its balance and spills its contents over Jon’s head before it rolls over and lands in the Lego box.

This time, Jon’s face scrunches up. He makes an annoyed noise and punches the table with his flat palm before scooting closer to the box.

“Alright?”, Gerry asks like Dad always does when he hits his head on a too low shelf.

Jon hands him three more blocks, already stuck together. He takes them, even though they’re the shorter ones he doesn’t want.

“Is alright. I hit my head. I’m, hm, not good on foot.”

“So that happens often?”

As an answer, Jon pulls his left sleeve up to the elbow and shows him a big bruise. “The door was faster”, he says, and it nearly sounds like a joke.

“Oh no”, Gerry says, the same moment Dad says: “Alright then!”

“I’m looking forward to more orders you might want to place”, says the younger woman at the register, where only she and Dad are left.

“It’s actually my wife’s decision, so we’ll see.” Dad laughs. “Gerry? Are you coming?”

“Yes!”, Gerry scrambles up, but stops for a moment. Jon looks up at him, still sitting next to the box.

“Bye-bye, Gerry!” He says with a wave. “When you come back, I will have a bigger tower!”

“Yes, I hope so!” Then he runs over to Dad, but still waves back at Jon, who doesn’t stop waving until they step outside.

Gerry tries to walk on his tiptoes when they walk past the shop’s window to see if Jon still sits there and plays or if he still waves, or if his mom went to pick him up. Unfortunately, he can’t see anything. The street, when they leave Sims and Evans Books behind, holds nothing else interesting for him to see. Just a couple of more shops.

“That went well”, Dad says. He’s carrying a big box with books in it, for sure. “Maybe we can work with them a couple more times. I left Mom’s wish list there. And then you can see your new friend again.”

Gerry hums. “He’s alright”, he says. “But he’s still very small.” There’s a small stone on the side of the road, just underneath the next window. Gerry kicks it, just enough to kick it again in a few steps.

“Well, she’s only five, but you play a lot with Danny, too.”

“Yes”, Gerry kicks his stone again, “but Danny is Tim’s little brother. I play with them both. And Danny has more race cars than I do.”

Dad chuckles. “And you have more books than both of them combined.”

Gerry kicks his stone a little too forcefully and it bounces off of a wall too far away to kick it again without running after it. His book will be waiting for him, right where he left it in the car. He hasn’t yet decided if he wants to keep reading, but he also has nothing better to do.

It’s only when he climbs into the car, with the books already safely in the car’s trunk, Dad only waiting for him to sit, when he notices he’s still holding the Lego blocks Jon gave him. It’s a small construction; three blocks of varying length, two in yellow and one in green, stuck together in no resemblance of order.

“Dad”, Gerry says when he sits inside. “Dad, I forgot to give Jon back his Legos.”

“Don’t worry about it, we can give them back when we’re home. Do you need help with the”

“No, I know how to use my seatbelt!” Gerry pouts. He fiddles with the belt for a second before it clicks and Dad gives him a thumbs up.

“Perfect, then let’s go home.” He closes the door before Gerry has any chance to argue.

“But Dad! What about the Legos?”

Dad gets into the car as well. “It’s Saturday. I’m sure your friend can survive the weekend without his toys, you can give them back to him in school on Monday.”

He starts the car. Gerry just frowns down at the toy in his hand. “But… isn’t that stealing?”

“How is it stealing if you give the things right back?”

“I can’t give it back!”, Gerry yells. If this is another game he doesn’t like playing it, at all. “We’re going back to London and Jon is still here!”

“Jon is”, Dad repeats the words, throwing quick glances into the mirror. “Gerry, who are you talking about?”

“The boy in the bookshop?” Gerry points back to the streets they’re rapidly leaving behind. “The little boy I was playing with? He was right there, there was only one other child besides me.”

“The… You mean the owner’s granddaughter?”

Gerry huffs. “No.”

“It’s really, Gerry, it’s not a big deal if you accidentally pocketed a few blocks. When we get home, I can call them and ask if they want them back, if that would make you feel better?”

“Yes, please!”

“Okay, okay, don’t worry about it.” Dad laughs. “And I was worried there for a second.”

Perfect. Jon can have his Legos back, Mom will be happy to see her new books, and Gerry… well, Gerry now has to sit through another sixteen million hours on their drive from Bournemouth to London. Maybe he should have asked for a toy anyway.

**Author's Note:**

> If anybody wants to chat my Tumblr is [clubsheartsspades](https://clubsheartsspades.tumblr.com/)


End file.
